Stormy Weather: Jon Schueler in New York

Musa Mayer, in her memoir of her father, Philip Guston, recalls vividly the moment at which the ground shifted under Abstract Expressionism in the late 1950s. Suddenly the major dealers were bringing in Pop Art and Color Field painting. Guston, together with De Kooning, Kline and the other major members of the New York School, were left feeling baffled and betrayed.

For a decade, they'd been the dominant figures in the art world. Theirs was the definitive style: Even painters who worked in other modes paid homage to their use of space and form, and the ways they deployed emotion and expression. They had conquered not only American but Western art in general, a counterpart— or aspect— of American hegemony in the world at large.

They were men (and a few women) in their prime, at the peak of their powers. They had by no means exhausted their potential. And yet, suddenly, they were old hat, and the dealers were looking for something new.

An art history revolution

How and why art styles change is a complicated question, whose imperatives range from the aesthetic to the commercial. Even at the height of Abstract Expressionism's brief reign— essentially from the end of World War II to the early 1960s— the image, though often sublimated, had never entirely disappeared.

But Pop Art, with its flat spatiality, reproductive quality and deliberate, knowing banality, was more than a return of the repressed. It was a repudiation of everything Abstract Expressionism stood for. Few revolutions in art history have been swifter or more successful.

The old guard of the New York School survived this onslaught to win their places in textbook accounts of the period, and to maintain their footing in major museum collections. They're a part of history, and, as the wide-ranging retrospective of their work now up at the Museum of Modern Art aggressively suggests, their cultural executors still make as large a claim for them as they made for themselves.

Arriving too late

Things haven't been so fortunate, however, for the lesser— or simply the later— representatives of Abstract Expressionism. Painters established by the mid- to late 1950s made the cut, but those just coming on the scene did not.

I'll never forget the shock of seeing Robert Richenburg's Black Paintings for the first time in his studio in East Hampton— people still ask me whether I don't mean Rauschenberg— and being stunned by a quality and a scale of ambition that seemed to me in no way inferior to the most established figures of the Expressionist movement. But those paintings had been produced between 1958 and 1962, and suddenly there was no market for them commensurate to their value. Out of mind, out of sight.

One New York gallery, David Findlay Jr., has tried to revive this lost legacy for some years now under its director, Louis Newman. Richenburg has been one of its featured artists; another is Jon Schueler.

Castelli's approval

Timing is everything: Schueler's life dates— 1916-1992— are identical to those of a painter featured in the Museum of Modern Art show, Richard Pousette-Dart. But Pousette-Dart had made his mark in the 1940s, and so he was included, at least peripherally, in the Expressionist pantheon.

Schueler, in contrast, wasn't widely noticed until the mid-1950s, when he was taken up by the dealer Leo Castelli. Castelli actually featured Schueler in the first one-man show at his 77th Street gallery, but within two years the men had parted company when Castelli started showing Pop. Something not dissimilar happened with Richenburg and his dealer, Tibor de Nagy.

Schueler was by all accounts a moody individual, and not one to suffer fools gladly. Like Pousette-Dart, his work was never strictly abstract even when it technically qualified as such, and when he discovered his destined place in the small fishing town of Mallaig in the western Scottish Highlands, he largely withdrew from the New York scene.

Sublime but sensory

Fascinated by the turbulent and ever-changing weather of Mallaig, Schueler combined Expressionist style and energy with the older landscape tradition of Constable and Turner to produce what might perhaps be best described as a kind of immanentism, in which cognizable forms lurk behind a striking and often Romantic palette but seldom concretely disclose themselves.

In short, Schueler is a painter of the sublime, but one rooted in the particulars of the sensory world in a way that the more overtly aspirational Pousette-Dart (to invoke again a painter whose sensibility was finally very different) is not.

The paintings on display in the present exhibition, Findlay's second solo show of Schueler in the past three years, belong to the latter 1950s, when Schueler was moving from rough-edged work applied with a palette knife to brush painting. He would later move on to watercolor, a natural progression as his forms became more refined. But the boldly shaping ruggedness of his personality—a trait he shared with his teacher, Clyfford Still—was apparent throughout. (I would have liked to see their studio sessions; what a contest of wills that must have been!)

The viewer's impulse

Schueler's paintings, though carefully worked, exude a dynamic, improvisational quality, a weather of their own that seems ready to transform itself even as the viewer tries to fix it. Three elements are thus in play: the sky-world that was Schueler's abiding subject, with its constant play; Schueler's own mercurial engagement with it, as mood shaped form and vice versa in a passionate, shape-shifting tussle; and the viewer's own response, in which the impulse to frame perception is checked by the wild vitality of the work before him.

It is a quality of all good, and certainly of all great art that it resists assimilation and continually provokes encounter. In Schueler, the terms of this interaction are particularly and forcefully evident.

You don't see his art; you wrestle with it. The experience is at once exhausting and exhilarating. I recommend it.